The Multinational Character Set (DMCS or MCS) is a

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

created in 1983 by

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president un ...

(DEC) for use in the popular

VT220 The VT220 is a computer terminal introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in November 1983. The VT240 added monochrome ReGIS vector graphics support to the base model, while the VT241 did the same in color. The 200 series replaced the ...

terminal Terminal may refer to: Computing Hardware * Terminal (electronics), a device for joining electrical circuits together * Terminal (telecommunication), a device communicating over a line * Computer terminal, a set of primary input and output devi ...

. It was an 8-bit extension of

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

that added accented characters,

currency symbol A currency symbol or currency sign is a graphic symbol used to denote a currency unit. Usually it is defined by the monetary authority, like the national central bank for the currency concerned. In formatting, the symbol can use various forma ...

s, and other character glyphs missing from 7-bit ASCII. It is only one of the

code page In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte. (In some c ...

s implemented for the VT220 National Replacement Character Set (NRCS). MCS is registered as IBM code page/

CCSID A CCSID (coded character set identifier) is a 16-bit number that represents a particular encoding of a specific code page. For example, Unicode is a code page that has several encoding (so called "transformation") forms, like UTF-8, UTF-16 and U ...

1100 (Multinational Emulation) since 1992. Depending on associated sorting

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word ...

calls it WE8DEC, N8DEC, DK8DEC, S8DEC, or SF8DEC. Such "

extended ASCII Extended ASCII is a repertoire of character encodings that include (most of) the original 96 ASCII character set, plus up to 128 additional characters. There is no formal definition of "extended ASCII", and even use of the term is sometimes critic ...

" sets were common (the National Replacement Character Set provided sets for more than a dozen European languages), but MCS has the distinction of being the ancestor of

ECMA-94 ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint ISO and IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-2, etc. There are 15 parts, excluding the abandoned ISO/IEC 8859-12. ...

in 1985 and

ISO 8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in ...

in 1987. The code chart of MCS with ECMA-94, ISO 8859-1 and the first 256 code points of

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

have many more similarities than differences. In addition to unused code points, differences from ISO 8859-1 are:

Character set

References

{{Character encoding Character sets Digital Equipment Corporation Computer-related introductions in 1983

Character set

See also

References